John Pierce Barnes

There was an interesting article in the June issue of “Pastel Journal” titled “History Reclaimed” about John Pierce Barnes (1893-1954), an impressionist artist, who was discovered recently. The pastel paintings that they show on the Pastel Journal website are stunning. In order to avoid any problems I haven’t included any pictures of his paintings here.

You can read the story in the following link, about how the curator of his paintings, Katherine Stanko, learned that the paintings existed and had been in storage since the artists death or maybe longer.

What inspires me the most is how wonderful his color choices were and his bold strokes. Many pastelists blend the heck out of their work and it thrills me to see unblended work from the 1920’s. It is also pretty easy to put together his very simple plein air palette from his work, which, of course, I had to do. It seems to be very limited, which is great for going out on location. Possibly, he had a small landscape set – I don’t know what was available in the ’20’s. I managed to fit all the colors into a small 5″x4″ box – it doesn’t get better than that!

Since I don’t keep the names of my colors, and now realize I have way too many colors, yet, not enough of these colors, I’ve made a color chart of what his palette probably was.

John Pierce Barnes Palette – it looks a little dark here but see below for actual pastel stickspastels for plein air – in a little cigar box